Alien Nation

Demonstrators display placards during a protest rally against the Australian government's asylum seeker policy in Sydney on August 24, 2013. - AFP

Earlier this month, The Global Mail published an account of a guard working in one of Australia’s detention centres. It is a harrowing piece of genius in illustrated form, the product of a series of interviews and a great deal of effort brought to stark, monochromatic life. It gets into the psychology of the people in detention centres, those confined by employment and those confined by pettiness, in a way words alone cannot.

Please take the time to read it. It is the lot of immigrant nations to be eternally and violently preoccupied with matters of immigration; and even when occasional embers of sanity like this are discovered, something happens to snuff them out. This time, it was the Australian government releasing an illustrated narrative of their own.